DC is DC Nation, and SS is Scott Snyder.
DC: Why should fans check this out?
SS: This is meant as a kind of closure to the whole saga that Greg Capullo and I did. I’m very proud of it. It’s way out there. It really has every character in the DCU, from Lex Luthor and Superman to surprising ones like Vixen. It takes place 25 years down the line.
DC: How did you come up with the idea for this story?
SS: I was at San Diego Comic-Con, and I met Grant Morrison for one of the first times, and I was completely a mess. I went through a period when I started on BATMAN where I was quite self-destructive. I just wasn’t ready for the pressure, and all I cared about was this work. I’d be up all night working on it, and it hurt a lot of things. It hurt my family, it hurt friendships, and I think Grant saw that and pulled me aside and was like, “You’re freaking out.” And I was like, It’s Batman! It’s Batman! You know, I don’t know how you do Batman. How do I keep up? And he said, Here’s what you need to do. You need to give your version of Batman a birth and a death and just know it’s yours and relax. It’s your version. You’re not fighting against Frank Miller, me, or whatever to try and touch the hem of that stuff at all. And it was so honestly transformative for me. Zero Year, was the birth of our character. I wrote that right after that conversation, and it was our origin, and this is the story I started thinking about all the way back then. I’m not going to say he’s going to die, but it’s at the end of our mythology. It takes all the pieces that we did from the Owls, the Red Hood, a lot of the things we kind of built and kind of brings them back to show where they wind up 20 years from now.
DC: How will fans of your acclaimed run on BATMAN react to this story?
SS: I try to put on horse blinders on otherwise and not worry about fan reaction. It’s not that I don’t care, because I do, I care a lot, but if I worry about it I feel like I start to get untrue to what I want to do, and the times that I’ve really believed in something that seemed out there, like DARK NIGHTS: METAL, fans have really shown up and been supportive, so I have to trust that now.
